Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Layla Moran

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 4th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

It is a pleasure to bring this Bill back to the House. It is crucial in ensuring that we can bear down on kleptocrats, criminals and terrorists who abuse our open economy, while also strengthening the UK’s reputation as a place where legitimate business can thrive. I am pleased to say that the Bill is now in a better place and there is a great deal more of it than when it left for the other place back in January. When introduced, the Bill ran to some 239 pages; it is now closer to 400. That reflects the spirit of genuine collaboration across both Houses and the fact that the Government have listened and taken many sensible proposals on board. I take this opportunity to thank Members of both Houses for their collaborative and cross-party approach.

The Government made significant amendments to the Bill in the other place. It is now unquestionably a milestone piece of legislation that takes the UK’s fight against economic crime to an entirely new level. I will summarise a few key changes, starting with the game-changing reforms to corporate criminal liability. As the Minister for Security, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), committed to, the Government tabled amendments to introduce a new failure to prevent offence, which will drive cultural change towards improved fraud prevention in organisations and, failing that, hold organisations to account with prosecutions if they profit from fraudulent actions.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

I thank the Minister for giving way so soon. It is undoubtedly a positive thing that failure to prevent, or at least part of it, has now been included in the Bill, but does he have any sympathy for those warning that because this measure is targeting the larger firms, the small boutique firms—the one-man bands that are very aware of what they are doing and know how to get around the system—will still be allowed to freely operate? Would he consider supporting the Lords amendment that would close that particular loophole?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I will speak in detail to the various amendments, including the non-Government amendments, one of which is on the threshold that the hon. Lady refers to. If I may, I will defer addressing that until later in my remarks.

The Government have also introduced reforms to the identification doctrine for economic crimes to make it easier to prosecute corporations in their own right for these offences. The House will know that this is the largest and most meaningful change to corporate criminal liability in decades. It will have a transformative effect on our ability to hold corporates to account for the actions of criminal individuals. I thank my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) for all their work and engagement to further the cause for the reform of corporate criminal liability.

We have also made amendments to tackle strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPPs, that feature economic crimes. We believe that this is the first national legislation in the world to combat SLAPPs. The new clauses will enable an appropriate, fair and effective early dismissal procedure against SLAPP cases. I very much thank the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) for his work in this area.

Members will also be pleased to hear that the Government have tabled amendments to improve the new statutory objectives for the registrar of companies, and I hope my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) and the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) in particular will welcome these improvements, given their previous amendments.

We also recognise the points made by several Members of this House, as well as in the other place, about the role of authorised corporate service providers in the identification process, and we have tightened the framework. Our amendments will improve the transparency of ACSPs, including by requiring verification statements made by ACSPs when they carry out ID verification on behalf of an individual to be made publicly available on the register.

Furthermore, we have tabled a number of important amendments to strengthen and increase the transparency of the register of overseas entities, which I trust the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) and the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) will welcome, given the amendments they proposed in Committee. I must pay tribute to my ministerial colleagues Lord Sharpe of Epsom, Lord Johnson of Lainston and Lord Bellamy for all the work they have done to get this important Bill to where it is now.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Layla Moran

Thursday 18th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Well, £90 billion is the amount of Labour’s uncosted spending plans, but let us talk about the £20 billion for now. The hon. Member is absolutely right to raise the issue of late payments. I attended a roundtable yesterday as part of our payment and cash flow review consultation, which is hugely important. We have significant engagement with businesses across the piece. We are determined and ambitious to reform the rules on late payments to ensure that businesses get paid on time. We have made significant progress in recent years in our international performance, so we are not an outlier. Nevertheless, we can and shall do more. The results of the consultation will be made available shortly.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

2. If she will make an assessment of the implications for her policies of trends in the level of use of non-disclosure agreements by businesses in cases relating to sexual assault, harassment and misconduct.

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Layla Moran

Report stage
Tuesday 24th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Lady gives me a significant reputation to live up to. She is right, however, that some of the things that we have seen, not least with regard to the Ukraine war, have been the catalyst for much of this overdue legislation. We are keen to bring forward exactly the measures she refers to.

The Bill contains a very considerable package of measures to deliver on our ambition. It includes the largest reform of the UK’s company registration framework in 170 years. Crucially, it provides transparency, exactly as the hon. Lady says, and affords and enables scrutiny. There are significant penalties—indeed, criminal penalties—for those, both individuals and their advisers, who seek to avoid that scrutiny. It also provides significant new powers for law enforcement and the private sector to protect the UK from fraud, international money laundering, illicit Russian finance and terrorist financing.

It is for this reason that I want to record my sincere thanks to all the right hon. and hon. Members who served on the Public Bill Committee. We had very constructive, frank and open debate—which I think should be welcomed on both sides and from both different perspectives—and really diligent scrutiny of the Bill. Their work has very much helped us to ensure that this legislation does not fall short of its important aims, and indeed has been improved as a result.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

May I echo the voices of those saying how delightful it is to see the Minister at the Dispatch Box? I shall not say more than that.

On a similar matter, the Minister may be aware of the revelations this morning from openDemocracy about the UK Government helping the head of the Wagner group circumvent sanctions already imposed on it to sue a British journalist working for Bellingcat. Is he aware of this story, has an investigation been done into this story, and would he take this opportunity to condemn what would seem to be very egregious in that—how shall I put it—these are sanctions we have imposed, yet we are somehow not imposing them in practice? This is not right.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I think it would be wrong to make any representations on any particular case, but seeking to enable somebody to avoid sanctions is entirely unacceptable, clearly. I am sure that those allegations will be looked into very carefully. We should definitely make sure that those are properly reviewed before we come to any firm conclusions, but in essence I agree with the principle behind the hon. Member’s statement.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Layla Moran

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point. As I say, I am looking forwards.

On adult social care, the Liberal Democrats are proposing—I would be curious to know whether Labour is planning the same—a penny in the pound on income tax to add to the social care budget, in order to sort out the short-term funding issues. That has to be just a short-term solution. The longer-term solution is not this tit-for-tat political to-ing and fro-ing; it has to be a cross-party effort to find a long-term settlement that will last for decades, not years.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I entirely agree with the hon. Lady on this. The Select Committees on Health and Social Care and on Housing, Communities and Local Government issued a joint report on the future funding of social care. One of its recommendations was a social care premium—an insurance based model like the German model. Would her party engage with that, on a cross-party basis, involving Conservative Members and Members on those Benches?

[Layla Moran]

I absolutely agree with that. Those calls were led by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who has been working on this issue on a cross-party basis. We have to do this together or we are not going to do it at all.

I now come to children’s services, an issue that, as a former teacher, is very close to my heart. Councils are overspending on these services, too—they did so by £872 million in 2017-18. The Public Accounts Committee has reported that 91% of authorities overspent. We are talking about young vulnerable children here. Something odd is happening, because although the number of children in the population has gone up, increasing by 7% since 2010, the number of child protection assessments has increased by 77%, on average, across the country. Worryingly, however, the figures are really different depending on the area of the country, suggesting that best practice is not being spread. For example, Camden Council has decreased the number of children that it has in looked-after care but other parts of the country have increased this by more than 90%. What are the Government doing to ensure that what some councils are clearly doing right is being spread? Meanwhile 42% of all local councils are rated as good or outstanding by Ofsted—but that means 58% are not. That is atrocious. We need to make sure that councils are held to account. My understanding is that Ofsted is so overstretched that it has for the moment suspended the rating of local councils. Will the Minister clarify whether that is true?

The final thing I wish to talk about is prevention. I serve on the Public Accounts Committee, and my colleagues and I are interested in value for money for the taxpayer. I am deeply concerned that the changes to children’s centres and youth services are not delivering value for money. In fact, worse than that, they are failing the young people of our country. The decrease in the number of Sure Start centres in Oxfordshire has meant that we cannot reach the same number of families as we did previously.

Meanwhile, the head of Ofsted said in her annual report:

“The evidence suggests that these cuts to youth and other services are a false economy, simply leading to greater pressures elsewhere.”

The Minister will know that in 2015 the Government axed the Audit Commission. Who is looking after the money? When something is cut in one Department, what effect is it going to have elsewhere? I am told that the responsibility is now in the purview of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, but it is not transparent. In the reports that the Public Accounts Committee has seen, it was not obvious that everyone knows what is going on. That is a key ask of the Minister: who is looking after the money? From what we have seen, not enough people are.

The lack of someone looking after the money has an effect on things such as the schools system. Schools have now become a repository for every other issue that has happened in local government, and we see the same with our police. I am sure many Members know of similar issues to those that I see in respect of special educational needs and disability funding: there just is not enough money adequately to support the children who need education, health and care plans. Why, when schools are already under funding pressure, are they being asked to provide the first £6,000 towards any plan? Surely it would make more sense that if a child has a need, that need is fulfilled.

Similarly, when are we going to see the Government address inequalities in the system, such as those relating to young carers? They are required in statutory legislation to undergo an assessment of what they need, but there is no legislation that follows through on that and says that they have to be provided with the things they have been assessed as needing. Who is dealing with those kinds of inequalities?

Homelessness

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Layla Moran

Tuesday 27th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran]

I absolutely agree. Indeed, I will make that point myself later. We need to ensure that the resources are available to make this work.

Local authorities spent £1.1 billion preventing and tackling homelessness in 2015-16, but the Public Accounts Committee found that there were problems: a lack of guidelines on how they should spend the funding they receive and what outcomes they are aiming for. The increase in spending to address homelessness coupled with ongoing cuts to local authority budgets means that councils are struggling to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. Instead, their funding is being spent on tackling homelessness after it has already occurred.

According to the National Audit Office report that underpinned our inquiry, spending on temporary accommodation, which is often poor, has risen from £622 million to £845 million. Meanwhile, countries such as Finland that have prioritised prevention are saving an average of £13,000 a year per homeless person. The key feature is that such countries give homeless people a stable place to stay, where they can rebuild their lives.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady therefore welcome the £28 million investment in the Housing First initiative, which is very much along the lines of the Scandinavian model to which she refers?

[Layla Moran]

I will, of course. Any money in this area is a good thing, but I do have a concern about the supplementary estimate for 2017-18 that I want to raise with the Minister.

The estimate proposes a reduction in current spending on preventing homelessness, from £265.8 million to £263.6 million. It also proposes to remove £25 million of capital funding previously allocated for reducing homelessness that will now not be spent in 2017-18. Given that the NAO and the Public Accounts Committee were both clear that there needs to be a focus on preventing homelessness in the first place, these figures are a cause for concern.

I very much welcome the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, as did the whole Committee. Our concern, however, was that far too much sway was put on the Minister for that Act alone to be the panacea. It is not going to work without extra funding available to councils in order to implement it and without funding for truly affordable rents, particularly social rents.

Let me highlight the case of one of my constituents, who lives in a rented house in Abingdon with her two children, one of whom has autism. She recently contacted me because, despite working full time, she cannot afford her rent and is terrified of eviction. She has looked high and low, but cannot find anywhere to live in Abingdon. This story exemplifies the crux of the issue. The report showed that the main driver of the current rise in homeless is the spiralling rents in the private rented sector. As a nation, how did we get to the stage where a mother in full-time work cannot afford a roof over her head?